Workshop at The Nib Crib 330-5pm £10 + booking fee (one free ticket left) Please book as limited capacity.
Showcase and open mic at West End Playhouse 7pm doors 930ish event end £5 (+ £1 booking fee)
Booking advised for open mic and audience. Limited capacity.
The Quiet Compere
Sarah L Dixon, The Quiet Compere of Huddersfield, is taking her unique show on a nine-date tour. Six live and three online events. This series will feature 73 performers and there will be short open mic sections at each event and workshops ahead of each showcase event.
The tour brings together a diverse selection of poets of all ages, cultures styles and experience, designed to entice an audience that may never have experienced spoken word events before. Sarah has been running spoken word events under her guise as The Quiet Compere for eleven years.
Quiet Compere events are unique. There are no lengthy introductions to poets, no-one is designated as ‘top-of-the-bill’ – all performers considered equal in Sarah’s eyes. Each line-up boasts a varied and diverse mix of poets, ranging from established local poets, some new to the scene who are ready to stun audiences with their talent, plus a generous sprinkling of nationally well-known poets and performers.
Matt Panesh
Matt Panesh was a multi award winning performance poet until 2015 when he “gave it a rest”. His material flitted between political social comment and crudity, and was polemic to the verge of confrontational, his shows had walkouts, sell-outs and in one memorable incident, a bottle-bin was hurled thankfully missing performer and audience. That show won two awards.
He’s written and performed several acclaimed one-man theatre shows including Welcome to Afghanistan, Love Hurts Actually, Greyhound and 300 to 1 which was selected for the Thespis Festival in Kiel, Germany and was performed on the 100th Anniversary of the Armistice in 2018.
In 2016 he moved to the West End of Morecambe where, with Nick Awde, he founded the Morecambe Fringe Festival and re-established the UK office of the International Theatre Institute.
Director of the Fringe he has seen it grow 625% since 2017.
He also opened up the Storefront venue The West End Playhouse, runs a “Make your Fringe show” Course, and produced and wrote the music for the local radio show The Alternative Space Programme putting Morecambe Spoken Word artists next to national and international voices.
Showcase Performers
Sarah Corbett is a prize-winning writer of poetry and fiction. She has published five collections of poetry, including the verse-novel, And She Was (Pavilion Poetry/Liverpool University Press, 2015), and most recently, A Perfect Mirror (Pavilion Poetry, 2018). She received an Eric Gregory Award for her first collection The Red Wardrobe (Seren, 1998) and her work has been shortlisted for the Forward and T.S. Eliot poetry prizes. Sarah is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Lancaster University, and lives in Hebden Bridge. A new collection of poetry is forthcoming from Pavilion in 2023.
Charlie Hart is a poet who has performed across the North, and at the Edinburgh Fringe, under the guise of Big Charlie Poet for over 10 years. His work is honest, from the heart, and tries to explore topics men aren’t encouraged to talk about. He is currently working on his debut pamphlet.
Joni j Journeyman is a local to the Lancaster and Morecambe area and has recently quit his job in the NHS, following a short illness, to lead a less stressful life. So why on Earth would he agree to do a spoken word slot, with very little material? Surely this is not stress-free occupation!? Jon does agree with this fact but as a lover of tbeing involved in the vibrant open mic scene and performing arts he wanted to dive straight in to create something. Jon is a fan of the creative process and in particular the rhythm of words, ideas, or just nonsense, evident in his song, I’ve got a horse called Jake.
Pete Kalu’s poetry can be found online on YouTube, at Lancaster University’s writers gallery, in the Bloodaxe Out of Bounds anthology, scattered across other anthologies, as lyrics to various songs (also on YouTUbe) , in his own poetry collection, Mongrel Moon, within his forthcoming short story, “Want me want me want me”(Lancashire Libraries) and at the back of his sc-ifi novel, Black Star Rising. His novel One Drop is published by Andersen Press in July 2022.
Zoe Lambert is a Mancunian expat slumming it in Lancaster, whose short stories have been published here and there, including Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, various anthologies by Comma Press, Confingo and other places. Comma Press published her connected short story collection, The War Tour. She is currently working on a book about losing her religion in Paris, which she is infuriatingly refusing to call either a novel or a memoir.
Martin Palmer is primarily a poet and is based in Morecambe. His long poem Till Roll was published by If A Leaf Falls Press in 2018, and he has been published in two Literary Lancashire Award Anthologies. He has performed at a number of events across the Northwest of England and is now enjoying being part of Morecambe’s creative community at The Nib Crib, a hub for writers and creatives that he helped to set up along with local, like-minded friends.
